On Wednesday, the Trump campaign began legal challenges by filing lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, as well as asking to join a pending case at the U.S. Supreme Court. On Thursday, Trump’s lawyers filed a legal challenge in Nevada, reports Reuters.
Most legal experts, other than Trump’s lawyers, say the flurry of lawsuits has little chance of changing the outcome of the election but might cast doubt on the process because of Trump’s seemingly endless tweets claiming the vote count must stop.
The number one biggest takeaway from all the litigation will be to prolong the vote-counting process and, secondly, make the American public have to wait longer for the results to be announced.
Georgia lawsuit dismissed
The Associated Press reported late this morning that Chatham County, Georgia Superior Court Judge James Bass dismissed a lawsuit brought by the state Republican Party and President Trump’s campaign, claiming a coastal county was not following state election laws on the processing of absentee ballots.
During the nearly one-hour hearing, Trump lawyers claimed that about 53 absentee ballots that poll observers said were not part of an original batch of ballots were added to the ballots already being counted after they arrived late. County elections officials testified that all 53 ballots had been received on time.
Lawsuits and choosing to ignore the truth
The Associated Press, as well as CNN, called Michigan as going to Joe Biden on Wednesday, even as the Trump campaign filed legal challenges in the state, as well as in Pennsylvania over not having enough access for campaign observers to locations where ballots were being processed and counted. Biden campaign attorney Bob Bauer on Thursday called the Trump campaign’s lawsuits merit-less.
“I want to emphasize that for their purposes these lawsuits don’t have to have merit. That’s not the purpose. … It is to create an opportunity for them to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process,” Bauer said, accusing the Trump campaign of “continually alleging irregularities, failures of the system and fraud without any basis.”
Perhaps the saddest thing happening the last couple of days is President Trump’s claims that the election is being stolen from him. This is the reasoning behind his tweets demanding the vote count be stopped. When you think about this closely, it is similar to his response to his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic – He chose to just put the crisis out of his mind.
Well, not even the president can stop the Constitutionally legal counting of the vote in the United States, and on the other hand, the coronavirus won’t magically disappear if Trump just puts it out of his mind. The truth hurts sometimes, but that’s the way life is for the majority of us.
Tilting at windmills
In December 2019, Trump caused an uproar on social media with his reference to wind turbines, saying he never understood wind power and describing them as being windmills that were “noisy,” and declaring they frequently “kill birds” including bald eagles. The comments showed his lack of understanding of wind power, according to Newsweek.
However, it was literary-minded Twitter users who noted that Trump’s acknowledgment of how little he knows about wind energy bares a striking resemblance to Miguel de Cervantes’ would-be knight character, Don Quixote – first published in 1604, under the title The Ingenious Knight of La Mancha.
The famous phrase, “Tilting at windmills” is in reference to someone attacking imaginary enemies. The story describes a scene where the chivalrous but delusional Quixote describes windmills as “hulking giants” and mistakes their sails or blades as “long arms.”
Since that time, the phrase, “tilting at windmills” has been referenced numerous times over the years, with the first time being in the 17th century. John Cleveland published The character of a London diurnall in 1644, in which we find: “The Quixotes of this Age fight with the Wind-mills of their owne Heads.”
Interestingly, the phrase was used in a political sense in April 1870 in the New York Times: “They [Western Republicans] have not thus far had sufficient of an organization behind them to make their opposition to the Committee’s bill anything more than tilting at windmills.”
Well, now, seeing as it is 2020, I feel compelled to add to the long referenced use of Cervantes’ famous phrase from Don Quixote”:
In his attempt to delegitimize the U.S. election process, the president has dredged up false allegations, from voter fraud to illegally counting of absentee ballots, intended to discredit the legitimate vote – much like Quixote – over 400-years-ago – tried to kill his imaginary giants by tilting at windmills.
